It used to be that if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your
homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school.

Of course, that was before school shootings became a part of our national lexicon.

Nowadays, as a result of the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, weapons and
terrorism, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground,
bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but they are being punished with suspension, expulsion, and even
arrest.

Welcome to Compliance 101: the police state’s primer in how to churn out compliant citizens and transform the nation’s
school’s into quasi-prisons through the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance
policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

If you were wondering, these police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

Rather, they’ve turned the schools into authoritarian microcosms of the police state, containing almost every aspect of
the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that
plagues those of us on the “outside.”

If your child is fortunate enough to survive his encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself fortunate.

Most students are not so lucky.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that
criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers
(police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes
rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those
around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a
world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

Zero tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the use of actual drugs and weapons by
students have turned students into suspects to be treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike,
while criminalizing childish behavior.

For instance, 9-year-old Patrick Timoney was sent to the principal's office and threatened with suspension after school
officials discovered that one of his LEGOs was holding a 2-inch toy gun.

David Morales, an 8-year-old Rhode Island student, ran afoul of his school's zero tolerance policies after he wore a hat
to school decorated with an American flag and tiny plastic Army figures in honor of American troops. School officials
declared the hat out of bounds because the toy soldiers were carrying miniature guns.

A 7-year-old New Jersey boy, described by school officials as "a nice kid" and "a good student," was reported to the
police and charged with possessing an imitation firearm after he brought a toy Nerf-style gun to school. The gun shoots
soft ping pong-type balls.

Things have gotten so bad that it doesn't even take a toy gun to raise the ire of school officials.

A high school sophomore was suspended for violating the school's no-cell-phone policy after he took a call from his
father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army who was serving in Iraq at the time.

A 12-year-old New York student was hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker.

In Houston, an 8th grader was suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in memory of her grandmother (the school has
a zero tolerance policy against the rosary, which the school insists can be interpreted as a sign of gang involvement).

Six-year-old Cub Scout Zachary Christie was sentenced to 45 days in reform school after bringing a camping utensil to
school that can serve as a fork, knife or spoon.

Even imaginary weapons (hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in
detention.

Equally outrageous was the case in New Jersey where several kindergartners were suspended from school for three days for
playing a make-believe game of "cops and robbers" during recess and USING THEIR FINGERS as guns.

With the distinctions between student offenses erased, and ALL offenses expellable, we now find ourselves in the midst
of what TIME magazine described as a “national crackdown on Alka-Seltzer.” Students have actually been suspended from
school for possession of the fizzy tablets in violation of zero tolerance drug policies.

Students have also been penalized for such inane "crimes" as bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope,
and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades.

A 13-year-old boy in Manassas, Virginia, who accepted a Certs breath mint from a classmate, was actually suspended and
required to attend drug-awareness classes, while a 12-year-old boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a
science project was charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug.

Acts of kindness, concern, basic manners or just engaging in childish behavior can also result in suspensions.

Another 12-year-old was handcuffed and jailed after he stomped in a puddle, splashing classmates.

Things get even worse when you add police to the mix.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers
(a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine
school shooting (nearly 20,000 by 2003).

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SROs) have become de facto wardens in the
elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst
with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention
or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a
trip to the courthouse.”

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark
closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained,
immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

According to a PROPUBLICA investigative report, such harsh punishments are part of a widespread phenomenon plaguing school districts across the country.

Indeed, as investigative reporter Heather Vogell points out, this is a local story everywhere.

It’s happening in my town.

It’s happening in your town.

It’s happening in every school district in America.

This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance
policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing
dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.

Even in the face of parental outrage, lawsuits, legislative reforms, investigative reports and endless cases showing
that these tactics ARE NOT WORKING and “should never be used for punishment or discipline,” full-grown adults—police officers and teachers alike—insist that the reason they continue to handcuff, lock up and
restrain little kids is because they fear for their safety and the safety of others.

“Fear for one’s safety” has become such a hackneyed and threadbare excuse for behavior that is inexcusable.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that explanation covers a multitude of sins, whether it’s poorly trained police
officers who shoot first and ask questions later, or school officials who are ill-equipped to deal with children who act
like children, meaning they don’t always listen, they sometimes throw tantrums, and they have a hard time sitting still.

Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry like to trot out the line that school safety should
be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook. What they will not tell you is that such shootings
are rare. As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the
schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles
and $100,000 shooting detection systems.

According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they
rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New York City’s public
schools is so large that if it were a local police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the
country.”

The ramifications are far-reaching.

The term “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to a phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school
have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail.

This profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives
for jailing young people.

Indeed, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish
behavior and jailing young people. For instance, two Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was revealed that they
had been conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million “kids for cash” scandal that resulted in more than 2500 children being found guilty and jailed in for-profit private prisons.

So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of
this country?

Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools. Now in addition to
the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized,
stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the court, our children in the public schools are
also fair game.

Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens
of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with
the government’s dictates.

After all, how do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and
immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone
the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when for most of his young life, he
has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk
back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

What can be done?

Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’
associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations
that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.

As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every school police raid and overzealous punishment that is carried out in the name of school safety, the lesson
being imparted is that Americans—especially young people—have no rights at all against the state or the police.

If we do not rein in the police state’s influence in the schools, the future to which we are sending our children will
be characterized by a brutal, totalitarian regime.

ends

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